Strange objects that are half a mile long and leave glittering trails behind them have been discovered punching through part of Saturn’s F ring, one of the more recently discovered rings around Saturn.

The objects, termed ‘mini-jets’, were found by scientists from Queen Mary University of London as they were working with images from NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft. They fill a missing hole in our understanding of the curious behaviour of the F ring. The results are being presented at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna (24 April 2012).